Slow job growth, informal employment and lack of inclusion of young people in the labour market are structural-nature characteristics limiting the sustainable development of Morocco and Tunisia. Nestled in the incipient industrial panorama of these countries, the footwear industry represents a crucial segment of the consumer goods sector accounting for most of the leather transformation activity, with a turnover of 273 m EUR in Morocco and 598 m EUR in Tunisia. Despite these significant figures, the footwear industry is facing two obstacles hindering its post-pandemic recovery and growth: the prevalence of low-skilled jobs and the lack of skilled labour. To tackle these limitations, our project will build capacity of senior footwear experts, VET teachers and VET students in a demand-oriented way according to the skills’ needs of the industry: green, digital and entrepreneurial. To this end, curricula will be designed following the competency-based approach and implemented through a sustainable training system built on a train-the-tutor approach, which will not only result in enhanced skills of the current and future workforce but also in an improvement of work-based learning for Dual VET in footwear. In addition, to facilitate the inclusion in the labour market of VET graduates, cooperation efforts between the VET system and the footwear industry will be endured through employability-boosting workshops and matchmaking events where VET graduates will be bridged to footwear employers. However, our project will not be limited to young people already in the VET system, but we will also promote the attractiveness of footwear VET among pre-VET students and NEETs through awareness-raising events. All these efforts will be materialised by the end of the project in a Skills Manifesto, which will be the cornerstone to foster the sustainable cooperation among stakeholders from the VET and footwear sectors, thus ensuring the sustainability of the project's results.